Last Night's Tipple

I finished the bottle of 2005 Van Duzer Vineyards Estate Pinot Noir last night, and it was just as enjoyable the second night as it had been the first. I didn't pick up the olive notes this time, but I did smell some floral components that I hadn't noticed before. In any event, I am very pleased with this wine, even at $25 a bottle. (And that $25 a bottle is a pretty good price -- I've seen it elsewhere for over $30. Costco's wine prices are very competitive.)

Both Van Duzer and the Willamette Valley Vineyards pinot that I had earlier in the week prominently display the logo for an organization named LIVE (Low Input Viticulture & Enology) on their back labels, advertising the fact that their wines are LIVE-certified. Well, what the heck does that mean? LIVE is a non-profit organization of winegrowers "providing education and certification for vineyards using international standards of sustainable viticulture practices in wine grape production." It turns out that they are a sort of halfway house between conventional viticulture and organic or biodynamic viticulture -- that is, a rejection of the "better living through chemicals" school of winegrowing but a realization that herbicides and fertilizers are sometimes necessary to make vineyards commercially viable. I don't have the energy or enthusiasm to read exactly what a winery has to do to be LIVE-certified, but it certainly sounds like a good thing to me. I don't really believe that chemical-free agriculture necessarily produces better-tasting or healthier products, but at the same time I don't wine that stinks of sulfur dioxide.

Last Night's Tipple

The skins of red grapes have tannins and pigments, and these tannins and pigments give red wine its backbone and color. The pinot noir grape, being a red grape, has tannins and pigments in its skin; but its skin is thin and consequently imparts much lower quantities of tannins and pigments than most red grapes, particularly the big boys like cabernet sauvignon and syrah. According to John Winthrop Haeger's book North American Pinot Noir,

[t]he thin skins’ tannins comprise only about 1.7 percent of the grape’s weight–as compared to 3 percent to 6 percent in most red varieties–and pinot’s anthocyanins, the soluble pigments that give most red wines their color, are present in less than half the quantity as in, for example, syrah.

This means that most pinot noir wines don't have really deep color and are not particularly tannic. In fact, all too many pinots are pale and thin; and that has been my principal complaint about the pinot wines that I have been trying recently. I don't really want pinot to be an inky, tannic monster that coats my tongue with grape sludge -- finesse and subtlety are usually attributes to be desired in a wine, particularly a pinot, in my opinion -- but I'd like it to remind me that it isn't just water with alcohol and some red food coloring added.

Costco is currently selling the 2005 Van Duzer Vineyards Willamette Valley Estate Pinot Noir for around $25 a bottle. When I saw it, I had never heard of Van Duzer Vineyards; but I liked the looks of the bottle and the shelf talker, and I bought a bottle. It was something of a risk -- insipid pinot noirs are all too common, even at high price points. Paying $10 for an insipid wine is merely disappointing. Paying $25 for one is actively infuriating. Well, fortunately, this Van Duzer pinot is not insipid. It's significantly darker than the other pinots that I have tried recently, and it also has more concentration and tannic backbone. There's some earth and some cherries on the nose, as well as olives. Yes, olives. Strange, at least to me, but not at all unappealing. There is a good deal of bright cherry fruit on the palate, and the wine has a nice bit of acidity, which I like. I wouldn't say that I have found the Holy Grail of pinot noir, but at least I found one that I like a good bit.

(It turns out that Van Duzer Vineyards was founded in 1989. They primarily make pinot noir, although they do make some pinot gris. All of the grapes that they use are grown on their own estates -- no purchased grapes. There are two separate lines: the lower-priced Estate line and the higher-priced Reserve line, which appears to be made up exclusively of single-vineyard wines. Based on my experience with the Estate pinot noir, I'd certainly be willing to shell out another $10 a bottle to try one of the Reserve wines.)

Last Night's Tipple

The conventional wisdom is that Willamette Valley of Oregon is a better, or at least a more Burgundian, location to grow pinot noir than is California. Since my first experiment with California pinot noir wasn't particularly successful, I figured that I might as well give some Willamette Valley pinot a whirl. And what better exemplar of Willamette Valley pinot noir than that from Willamette Valley Vineyards? Willamette Valley Vineyards is one of the older producers in the area, having been founded in 1983 by native Oregonian Jim Bernau on land that he says "is similar to the red clay soil found in the Grand Cru Pinot Noir vineyards of Romaneé-st-Vivant in Burgundy". The winery produces some chardonnay, pinot gris, and riesling; but the emphasis is on pinot noir, and WVV produces several different bottlings. The one that I see most frequently is the Whole Cluster Fermented pinot. The winemaker's notes on this wine make it clear that what they mean by "whole cluster fermentation" is carbonic maceration, where whole clusters of fruit are sealed in vats filled with carbon dioxide. This environment promotes an anaerobic fermentation. Carbonic maceration is used extensively in Beaujolais and elsewhere to produce intensely fruity wines, and that appears to be WVV's intention with this one. It was suggested as a light aperitif wine, and that wasn't really what I was looking for. I chose instead the mainline 2006 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. I thought that the vinification would have been more traditional, and the label says that the wine has spent time in French oak. The winemaker's notes confuse me, however. They say that "approximately 70% of the grape berries [remain] intact for inter-berry fermentation (which adds fruitiness)." That sounds like carbonic maceration to me, too, although I don't know why WVV wouldn't just come out and say it if in fact it was.

In any event, my first sniff prompted me to say, "well, finally, here's a real pinot." There was a good bit of earthiness, along with plenty of bright cherry fruit and violets. A lot of good pinot will supposedly have elements of roses or violets (or both) on the nose, and I like it when I find it. On the palate, it was fruity and pleasant. I have two complaints about it. First, it seemed a bit thin and short. Once I swallowed it, it was gone. There was no lingering aftertaste. It didn't coat my mouth with pinot-y goodness. Secondly, I would have preferred if it had been a bit more acidic. It seemed a bit flabby to me. All in all, though, I enjoyed it. At $20 a bottle, I don't know if it brings a whole lot of value; but then again, I haven't been doing very well with pinots that are cheaper.

Last Night's Tipple

I finished off the bottle of 2005 Toad Hollow Goldie's Vines Pinot Noir last night, and I can't really say that it improved with time being open. It still had that musty aroma, and it didn't really bring much except tartness. André Tchelistcheff, the legendary winemaker at Beaulieu Vinyards, famously said that God made cabernet sauvignon while the devil made pinot noir; and I can believe it. This wine was not inexpensive, and yet it is very unsatisfying. It seems like it is almost ever thus with pinot noir. Every once in a while, one has a profound experience with pinot noir, which makes one willing to flush a lot of money down the toilet trying to find a repeat.

In addition to being a very prolific parent (having crossed with gouais to produce chardonnay, gamay, aligoté, melon de Bourgogne, and many others), pinot noir is also susceptible to mutation. Various mutations of the pinot noir have produced the pinot meunier, the pinot blanc, and the pinot gris (or pinot grigio in Italy and some parts of the United States), each of them relatively important in its own right. Pinot gris especially is an interesting case. Its name means "gray pinot," and that is a very good description. Where the skins of pinot noir grapes are a midnight blue in color, the skins of pinot gris grapes are much lighter -- a kind of pale blue-gray. You would never guess from looking at the pale wine that pinot gris produces that the skins are anything other than yellow-green. But they are. Pinot is a strange thing, indeed.

Last Night's Tipple

Toad Hollow Vineyards began as a partnership between Todd Williams (comedian Robin Williams' half brother) and Rodney Strong, the head of Rodney Strong Vineyards. Both Williams and Strong are now deceased (the former in 2007, the latter in 2006), but the motto of the vineyards remains unchanged: "Fine wine at a reasonable price." I have had a number of Toad Hollow wines, and I have always been impressed both by the quality of the wines and the lowness of the price. Cacophany, the Toad Hollow Zinfandel is very good, as is the Amplexus Blanquette de Limoux sparking wine. I also like the whimsical label illustrations, the obvious irreverence of the company, and the approach that they take to wine. That is, they believe, or appear to believe, that wine is not supposed to be a great mystery, only consumed by the learned and only with a serious and contemplative mien. And so, when faced with thirty or forty feet of shelf of California pinot noirs about which I knew nothing, I was drawn to the 2005 Toad Hollow Goldie's Vines Russian River Valley Pinot Noir.

The Toad Hollow website says that the 2005 vintage is "our best to date." I didn't have the previous vintages, but I have to say that that doesn't encourage me very much. When I first opened this wine, I suspected that it was corked. There was this mushroomy mustiness on the nose that I didn't like at all. Wines infected with TCA are supposed to smell like musty cardboard, and I suspected that that was what was going on here. On the other hand, though, pinot noir can take on some earthy characteristics, so I thought that it would be prudent to try this instead of just pouring it out. Well, there wasn't a whole lot in the wine. Not much fruit, not much pleasure, not much of anything except a mushroomy mustiness on the nose and a good deal of acidity. I don't really know if this bottle was corked, but I do know that I didn't particularly like it.

Last Night's Tipple

Finished off the bottle of 2005 Albert Bichot Bourgogne Rouge last night, and my impressions remain the same: it's pleasant enough, I suppose, but there's not a whole lot of there there. Not much nose, not much flavor, not much of anything. Maybe it's possible to get a good Pinot Noir for $13. I just haven't found one yet.

For decades in the 19th and 20th Centuries, the most widely-accepted theory of the spread of viticulture in Europe, Africa, and the near East held that vitis vinifera was first domesticated in Mesopotamia and was subsequently transplanted to Europe and Africa mostly by the Greeks and the Romans. There are a couple of problems with that theory. First, wild ranged all over the Mediterranean basin as far north as Belgium up until the late 19th Century. It's highly unlikely that anyone would have transplanted clippings of wild vinifera, so it's likely that the vine was indigenous to most of this area. Given this, why should we think that domestication happened in one and only one location? Second, there's the matter of the pinot noir grape. It's not like any of the near Eastern grape varieties that the Romans were known to have distributed throughout the Empire, but there is decent evidence that it or something like it has been cultivated in Burgundy for almost 2000 years (Columella, writing in the First Century AD, describes a pinot-like grape growing in Burgundy), and there is evidence of vine cultivation in what is today France before the advent of the Romans. Furthermore, consider pinot's offspring. Chardonnay and Gamay, two of the best-known, are both products of presumably accidental field crosses between pinot noir and gouais, a white variety known to have been brought to France from the near East by the Romans. (There are many other pinot-gouais offspring, including aligoté and melon de Bourgogne, the grape of Muscadet.) Both of these grapes are unusually hardy, growing well in a variety of environments. Chardonnay, in particular, can and does grow just about anywhere and is usually capable of producing good or great wine wherever it grows. It's a truism of genetics that genetic diversity between parents is more likely to result in hardy offspring than genetic similarity, and genetic diversity is frequently the result of distance. That doesn't prove that pinot noir was domesticated in northern France, of course, but it is suggestive.